I am general editor of the seven-volume Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (the first two volumes appeared in 2016) and co-editor of his penultimate novel, Crotchet Castle (1831). In 2017, Kathryn Sutherland and I published a newly edited and annotated text of Jane Austen’s Teenage Writings for the Oxford World’s Classics series. I’m now finishing a critical study of the young Jane Austen, which will be published by Princeton University Press.

Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century

Teenage Writings

2017

|

Book

Three notebooks of Jane Austen's teenage writings survive. The earliest pieces probably date from 1786 or 1787, around the time that Jane, aged 11 or 12, and her older sister and collaborator Cassandra left school. By this point Austen was already an indiscriminate and precocious reader, devouring pulp fiction and classic literature alike; what she read, she soon began to imitate and parody.
Unlike many teenage writings then and now, these are not secret or agonized confessions entrusted to a private journal and for the writer's eyes alone. Rather, they are stories to be shared and admired by a named audience of family and friends. Devices and themes which appear subtly in Austen's later fiction run riot openly and exuberantly across the teenage page. Drunkenness, brawling, sexual misdemeanour, theft, and even murder prevail.